2. Safe Harbor
1
This presentation and the accompanying oral presentation contain “forward-looking” statements that are based on our management’s beliefs and assumptions and on information currently
available to management. We intend for such forward-looking statements to be covered by the safe harbor provisions for forward-looking statements contained in the U.S. Private Securities
Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements include all statements other than statements of historical fact contained in this presentation, including information concerning our
financial outlook, business plans and objectives, potential growth opportunities, competitive position, industry environment and potential market opportunities.
Forward-looking statements are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties, assumptions and other factors including, but not limited to, those related to our future financial performance,
market acceptance of our solutions, our ability to increase sales of our solutions, including to attract and retain customers and to selling additional solutions to our existing customers, our ability
to develop new solutions and bring them to market in a timely manner, pricing pressure (as a result of competition or otherwise), our ability to maintain, protect and enhance our brand and
intellectual property, global economic conditions and our ability to continue to expand our business and manage our growth. Moreover, we operate in very competitive and rapidly changing
environments, and new risks may emerge from time to time. It is not possible for our management to predict all risks, nor can we assess the impact of all factors on our business or the extent to
which any factor, or combination of factors, may cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in any forward-looking statements we may make. Further information on these and
other factors that could affect our financial results are included in our filings we make with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and may cause our actual results, performance or
achievements to differ materially and adversely from those anticipated or implied by our forward-looking statements.
You should not rely upon forward-looking statements as predictions of future events. Although our management believes that the expectations reflected in our forward-looking statements are
reasonable, we cannot guarantee that the future results, levels of activity, performance or events and circumstances described in the forward-looking statements will be achieved or occur.
Moreover, neither we, nor any other person, assume responsibility for the accuracy and completeness of the forward-looking statements. We undertake no obligation to publicly update any
forward-looking statements for any reason after the date of this presentation to conform these statements to actual results or to changes in our expectations, except as required by law.
In addition to GAAP financial information, this presentation includes certain non-GAAP financial measures. The non-GAAP measures have limitations and you should not consider them in
isolation or as a substitute for our GAAP financial information. There are limitations to the use of non-GAAP measures. For example, bookings and free cash flow are not substitutes for
revenues or cash provided by operations. In addition, non-GAAP operating expenses exclude the impact of stock-based compensation expense, which is a recurring expense for us. See the
Appendix for a reconciliation of these non-GAAP financial measures to their nearest GAAP equivalent.
4. Investment Highlights and Nimble Storage Snapshot
33
Disruptive platform built on two foundational innovations:
CASL, flash-optimized file system
InfoSight, cloud-based management
Significant and broad-based traction
Diverse base of enterprises and cloud service providers
Broad set of workloads
$18B market opportunity*
Exceptional revenue growth with scalable margin profile
Experienced technology and management team
402
1,372
3,097
Q1FY13 Q1FY14 Q1FY15
Cumulative Customer Base
$14
$54
$126
$22
$47
FY12 FY13 FY14 Q1FY14 Q1FY15
+134%
Revenue Growth
+110%
*Source: Based on company estimates from IDC and Gartner data
5. Flash and Disk are Complementary
Component Flash Disk
Random IO/$ 100X 1X 2017?
Sequential IO/$ 1X 3X 2019?
Capacity/$ 1X 15X 2025?
Write Endurance Poor Proven
4
Need for Performance Varies Greatly
Analytics
VDI
OLTP
File Services
Low High
Core design principles:
• Efficiency: Leverage flash and disk for their complementary characteristics
• Flexibility: Adapt to workloads, and as the merits of flash and disk evolve over time
6. Simplifying Management Is As Critical As Scaling Performance and Capacity
5
20XCompute
10XNetwork
Poor Application
Performance
Storage Same
40-45%*
CAGR
Increasing Demands
of Data Growth
Cloud ComputingVirtualization Big Data Social and Collaboration
Exacerbating Trends
Mobility
VM / Application Data
Management Complexity
CRM
ERP
CRM
ERP
*Source: IDC, The Digital Universe in 2020, sponsored by EMC
7. Our Value Proposition
CASL™
Flash-optimized file
system software
InfoSight™
Cloud-based
management/support
6
Non-disruptive, flexible
scaling to massive scale
Peak system health
and availability
Scale-To-Fit
Rapid Backup and
Recovery
Integrated Protection Proactive Wellness
Significantly better
performance / $ and
capacity / $
Efficiency
8. Tiering
Flash Arrays for High Performance
Incumbent Response
Flash Requires a Ground-Up Design
7
Data Management
• Compression
• Snapshots
• Thin provisioning
• Replication
• Others
Application
Integration
File System
Software
Key Decisions in
Ground-Up Design
How do we:
Leverage flash for performance, while
overcoming endurance concerns?
Leverage disk for capacity?
Be media-agnostic and flexible as the
merits of flash and disk evolve?
Leapfrog incumbents on data
management?
9. Traditional File Systems / Tiering Nimble AdvantageCASL Innovations
CASL: A Breakthrough File System
8
Uses 30-70% less disk and
flash resources
Inline Compression,
using variable blocks
Fixed blocks:
No compression
Fast random writes
need a flash tier
Uses low-cost HDDs to deliver
SSD-like write performance
Inline Serialization of
all incoming write IO
Disk
SSD (Flash) Cache
More Disk
More Flash
Dynamic Caching to
serve reads from flash
Uses substantially less, low-
cost flash to accelerate reads
Fast reads by migrating
between tiers wastes flash
Copy-based snapshots
waste capacity and
degrade performance
Pointer-Based
Snapshots
Integrated, rapid backup
and recovery
Non-disruptive scaling
in least-cost increments
Scale-to-Fit: Scale-up,
deep and scale-out
Scale-Up OR
Limited Scale-Out
CASL is more performance and capacity efficient and easy to scale, while delivering integrated data protection
10. Adaptive Flash Eliminates Silos
9
Traditional Approach Nimble Approach
Capacity Performance Performance + Capacity + Data Protection in oneData Protection
11. Traditional Storage Management is Inefficient and Expensive
10
!
#
!
#
!
#
!
#
!
#
? ??
With modern data analytics tools
can vendors predict and prevent
problems before they occur?
In a connected world why
can’t vendors proactively monitor
customer deployed systems?
Vendor
12. InfoSight: Cloud-Based Management
Leveraging pervasive network connectivity and big data analytics to automate support and enable cloud-based management
Nimble Approach Customer Benefits
Comprehensive
Telemetry
Analysis and
Automation Storage Management
SaaS Offering
Proactive
Wellness
Community
Learning
11
13. InfoSight Impact
12
Predicting Customers’ Storage Expansion Needs**
customers
expanded capacity
385 103
customers
expanded flash
37
customers
upgraded controllers
Proactive Support Prevents Problems*
92%
81%
of the cases
automatically
opened by Nimble
of support cases
auto-closed
by Nimble
* InfoSight case percentages based on 9 month period through Q1FY15
** Customer storage expansion needs based on 12 month period through Q1FY15
14. Market Response Has Led to Rapid Growth in Our Installed Base
13
33
97
211
Q1FY13 Q1FY14 Q1FY15
40
131
285
Q1FY13 Q1FY14 Q1FY15
Cumulative Customer Base Number of Large Enterprises*
Number of Cloud Service Providers
402
1,372
3,097
Q1FY13 Q1FY14 Q1FY15
*Company estimates of Global 5,000 customers
15. Broad Appeal
14
Diversified Workloads*
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
70%
80%
90%
Diversified Market Verticals*
*Based on 12 month period through Q1 FY15. Y axis represents % of systems in the field that handle this type of workload
14%
Financial
11%
Service
Providers
10% Hi-Tech
10%
Education9%
Healthcare
9%
State/local
government
7%
Mfg.
5%
3%
24%
Energy
Legal
Other
16. Channel Leverage
15
Base of Accredited SEs**
Active Reseller AEs*
Engagement Levels
732
2,189
Q1FY14 Q1FY15
+199%
Reseller Led New Customer Wins****
Channel Generated Opportunities***
Opportunities & Customer Wins
1,013
1,751
Q1FY14 Q1FY15
+73%
66
178
Q1FY14 Q1FY15
+170%
335
685
Q1FY14 Q1FY15
+104%
* Total number of reseller AEs that closed 1 or more deals during the fiscal quarter ** Total cumulative number of accredited SEs as of the end of each fiscal quarter
*** Total number of opportunities generated by partners during the fiscal quarter **** Total number of new customers during the quarter where the reseller contributed 75% (or greater) of total effort to close the deal.
17. Land and Expand Strategy: 2-Year Bookings After Initial Sale
16
Note: Bookings defined as a purchase order received; statistics as of April 30, 2014
* Top 50 of all customers that have been Nimble Storage customers for 4 or more quarters; Of the 50, 20 customers have 8 quarters of history.
Average: All Customers
Initial Sale Total: Year 1 and 2
4.8X
1X
Top 50 Customers*
Initial Sale Total: Year 1 and 2
2.1X
1X
18. Market Landscape and Our Opportunity
17
Performance Intensive
Mainstream Applications
High-Performance Computing
Cheap and Deep
Hybrid / Disk Arrays
Archival
All Flash Arrays
Server
Flash
Archival
Real Time Analytics
Workloads
Adaptive Flash Platform
Oracle / Sql
VDI
SAP
VMware
Vertica
Mongo DB
Exchange
SharePoint
EMC VNX
NetApp FAS
HP 3PAR
Dell EQL/CML
Pure, SolidFire
XtremIO
Industry Nimble Storage
Server
Flash
20. Financial Highlights
Strong revenue growth with a significant “land and expand” opportunity
Attractive and best-in-class gross margin profile
Investments to expand differentiation and capitalize on large market opportunity
Improving operating leverage and cash flow from operations
Attractive long term financial model
19
21. $8.2
$11.0
$14.6
$20.2
$22.1
$28.5
$ 41.7
$ 46.5
Q1FY13 Q2FY13 Q3FY13 Q4FY13 Q1FY14 Q2FY14 Q3FY14 Q4FY14 Q1FY15
Product Revenue Support and Service Revenue
Quarterly Revenue
Rapid Revenue Growth
20
Annual and Q1 Revenue*
$33.4
$14.0
$53.8
$125.7
$22.1
FY12 FY13 FY14 Q1FY14 Q1FY15
$46.5
Product Revenue Support and Service Revenue
+134%
+110%
*Fiscal year ends on January 31
22. Growth Drivers
21
402
1,372
3,097
Q1FY13 Q1FY14 Q1FY15
Cumulative Customer Base
Customers
% New vs. Existing Customer Bookings
100
49
58
0
100
200
Initial Sale Year 1 Year 2 Total
2-Year Bookings* After Initial Sale
Average Across All Customers
207
New
customers
Existing
customers
64%
36%
12 months thru Q1FY15
Land and Expand
74%
12months thru Q1FY14
26%
* Defined as the dollar value of a purchase order received; statistics as of April 30, 2014
** Number of deals for 12 month period through Q1FY14 and Q1FY15
% Customer Bookings > $100K
Number of Deals > $100K**
Bookings
<$100K
Bookings
>$100k
64%
36%
12 months thru Q1FY15
Deals >$100K
177
393
TTM Q1FY14 TTM Q1FY15
+122%
23. Attractive Gross Margin Profile
22
61.8%
64.3%
66.4%
67.2%
66.2%
Q1FY14 Q2FY14 Q3FY14 Q4FY14 Q1FY15
65.8%
69.0%
22.8%
44.8%
Q1FY14 Q1FY15
Product Gross Margin Support and Service Gross Margin
Quarterly Gross Margin* Product and Support and Service Gross Margin*
*Reflects Non-GAAP Gross Margin; see slide 26 for reconciliation
24. $6
$14
$24
Q1FY13 Q1FY14 Q1FY15
$3
$6
$12
Q1FY13 Q1FY14 Q1FY15
Investing For Growth While Demonstrating Operating Leverage
60
120
188
Q1FY13 Q1FY14 Q1FY15
Head Count
72% 62%
52%
Q1FY13 Q1FY14 Q1FY15
% of RevenueHead Count
23
$ Millions
$ Millions
93
211
356
Q1FY13 Q1FY14 Q1FY15
Research and Development*
Sales and Marketing*
37%
27% 25%
Q1FY13 Q1FY14 Q1FY15
% of Revenue
*Reflects Non-GAAP Research and Development and Sales and Marketing, which excludes stock based compensation expense. See slide 26 for reconciliation.
25. -47%
-27%
-36%
-22%
FY13 FY14 Q1FY14 Q1FY15
Improving Operating And Cash Flow Margins
24
v
Cash Flow From Operations and
Free Cash Flow % of Revenue**
Improving Operating Margin*
*Reflects Non-GAAP Operating Margin, which excludes stock based compensation expense. See slide 26 for reconciliation
**Free cash flow is defined as net cash from operating activities minus capital expenditures
-33%
1%
-39%
-7%
Q2FY13 Q3FY13 Q4FY13 Q1FY14 Q2FY14 Q3FY14 Q4FY14 Q1FY15
Operating Cash Flow as % of Total Revenue
Free Cash Flow as % of Total Revenue
26. Business Model
25
FY13 FY14 Q1FY15 Long-Term Model
Gross Margin* 62% 65% 66% 63%–65%
R&D as % of Revenue* 28% 26% 25% 11%–13%
S&M as % of Revenue* 72% 57% 52% 28%–31%
G&A as % of Revenue* 9% 9% 10% 5%–6%
Non-GAAP Operating
Margin
-47% -27% -22% 16%–20%
*Reflects Non-GAAP Gross Margin, R&D, S&M, G&A and Operating Margin, see slide 26 for reconciliation
Note: due to rounding, numbers presented above may not sum to total.
28. Sales and Marketing
Invest aggressively to deepen
sales coverage within existing territories,
expand internationally, and drive continued
channel leverage
Customers
Continue expansion into
large enterprise and service
provider customers
People
Build best-in-class company
founded on recruiting and retaining
the industry’s best talent
Our Strategic Priorities
27
Technology Platform
Build on our broad technology
foundation to further extend our
differentiation, broaden feature coverage,
and further expand our target market
29. Positioned to Lead in the Flash-Storage Era
Opportunity for a ground up redesign of storage
2013 TAM:
~$40B
1980s
DAS
1995+
Networked Storage
Today
Flash Storage
Be the market leader in storage by delivering the industry’s most efficient flash-storage platform
28
31. Fortune 500 Engineering & Construction Company
Competitor Solution
Fortune 500 Engineering & Construction Company
30
80% physical servers; EMC & NetApp SAN
Struggled with performance for Autonomy
e-discovery & Oracle data warehouse
Application backups taking over 10 hours
Challenges
Performance up by 2X, despite using virtual servers
Data reduction of 2.3X lowers $/GB substantially
Snapshots -based backup eliminated backup window
Replication for DR
Power, cooling and space costs lower by $3,500/month
Nimble Advantage
Nimble SmartStack
DR with 90 days
of replicated
snapshots
Prod (Houston) DR (Austin)
Replication
6U!
110TB with 2.3X
data reduction
30 days of
snapshots
Primary SAN: 2 Racks
Pre-Nimble Environment
Daily backup to tape
32. Lower TCO: Global Office Products Company
Competitor Solution
3 Racks of “Tier 1” storage
40TB Usable
Storage in 126U
Nimble Solution
2 CS 460 arrays
59TB Usable
Storage in 6U
“Nimble has given us much more
flexibility with primary storage and data
protection and a much more resilient
infrastructure – all at a much lower
cost.”
—IT Platform Lead
SQL Server, SAP applications
and other VMs using traditional
“Tier 1” Storage
Core project drivers:
– Minimize data center
costs like power, cooling
– Reduce storage
capacity costs
– Reduce complexity
9X Reduction in Storage Costs
20X Reduction Footprint
50% Savings in Data Protection Costs
Zero Impact to Performance
Replaced
With
Challenges
31
33. Consolidation and Efficiency at a Global Oil and Gas Leader
Global Energy leader with hundreds of
remote sites
Initial VDI project goal to consolidate
thousands of employee desktops at
hundreds of field locations
XenDesktop deployment with
incumbent storage experienced
serious performance issues,
prompting a competitive bake-off with
Nimble
Challenges
Price-performance: 72% lower cost per
IOPS
Cost of capacity: 37% compression,
coupled with low-cost, Nearline HDDs
50% lower recovery time for virtual PCs
Calls to help desk reduced dramatically
Nimble VDI Solution
3000 VDI users
64TB and 30K
IOPS on average
Nimble Expanded Use Cases
Phase 2: Exchange
11,500 mailboxes
~60TB used
HA across two data centers
Phase 3: ESX Farm
600 VMs
Over 200 TBs across three
data centers
10 systems and over 600 TB of capacity in 18 months
32
34. 33
Storage challenges in
meeting the needs of a high-
performance Vertica cluster
- Constant trade-off
between IO and capacity
- Adding nodes to support
storage was not cost
effective
- Lack of consolidated
provisioning and
management
- Data protection difficult for
separate storage pools
Challenges
Reduced cost by reducing the
number of required HP Vertica nodes
- Performance to meet the IO needs
of the analytics workload
- Scale-to-fit architecture allows for
separately scaling IO or capacity
Consolidated storage management
Nimble snapshots, clones and
replication improve data protection
and eliminate risk
Nimble AdvantageNimble Solution
Customer Case Study: Fortune 50 Telecommunications Company
Vertica cluster processing Billions
of events / hour
170TB capacity
Hourly snapshots
for data protection
35. Customer Case Study: Global Managed Services Firm
Global firm with over
19,000 professionals
Managed Services
focused on delivering
hosted Microsoft
Applications
EMC storage
deployed as core
storage platform
Situation
19 Nimble systems in 5 countries
Goals from an alternative solution:
Lower capital costs
Small foot-print to lower monthly
data center costs of $14,000
Faster backup and recovery, to
avoid traditional backup challenges
Scalable platform for expansion
Challenges
EMC VNX 7500 for 10,000
Exchange users
Nimble Solution
6U of Nimble storage replaced 2
racks of EMC
Nimble Advantage:
Much lower capital costs
Data center and rack space cost
savings of ~$10,500/ month
Compression of 1.5X
Snapshots for backup and recovery
Non-disruptive upgrades
34
36. Customer Case Study: Leading Cloud Services Provider
35
Service Provider with
presence across the US
Core drivers:
• Datacenter consolidation
• Rapid provisioning
• Performance scaling
Large Telecom customer
with scaling challenges
prompted POC
Challenges
Much higher performance at
substantially lower capital costs:
Compression savings of 50% site-wide
High-density HDDs and more effective
use of flash optimize both performance
and capacity
Much simpler management and
faster on-boarding time
Current environment comprises over
600 TB (pre-compression) hosting
over 6000 VMs for hundreds of
customers and a variety of workloads
Nimble AdvantageNimble SmartStack
10G iSCSI 10G UCS
VMWare
+
Cisco
Nimble
+
37. Transforming Storage Efficiency at a Large Bank
36
Storage costs were 30% of
the capital budget
Core project drivers:
• Performance scaling
• Storage budget
• Datacenter footprint
Challenges
1.5x usable capacity and 50%
lower capital costs
10x lower power and cooling costs
Dramatically simpler storage
management
Phase 1:
Exchange
½ Rack
6 Racks
2.5x performance and 2x usable
capacity at much lower capital costs
75% lower power and cooling costs
Dramatically simpler storage
management
Phase 2:
SQL
Databases
¾ Rack
3 Racks
Competitor Hybrid
Disk-Flash Solution
Nimble AdvantageNimbleVS.
38. Nimble chosen as the platform
for all 11 sites
Each site protected with hourly
snapshots for rapid recovery
Data replicated between offices
for cost-effective and simple DR
Significant savings on storage and
bandwidth
Nimble Approach
Transforming Data Protection at a Global Consulting Firm
37
Boston
Data Center
Chicago
Data Center
9 Remote Sites
Inadequate data protection in
9 remote sites:
• Tapes for backup
• Offsite tape copies for disaster recovery
Aging storage infrastructure in
their main data centers:
Boston and Chicago
Challenges
Rethinking infrastructure at
all of their 11 sites
40. Industry Approach: Add Flash to Disk-Centric Architecture
39
Incumbent Response:
Tiering
Flash SSD
HDD
Write tiers are expensive
High endurance flash to absorb
random writes
RAID protection overhead
Migration requires “excess” flash
Large (MB/GB) units of migration
Infrequent (mins/hours) migration
Infrequent migration is inherently
less responsive
41. CASL Delivers Industry Leading Efficiency
Nimble
Inline Compression
and Serialization
SSDLow-Cost HDDs
Substantially more
performance and
capacity efficient
Less and low-cost flash
Fewer, low-cost HDDs
Inline compression
Responsive: adapts rapidly
to workload changes
Variable blocks facilitate
inline compression, saving
flash and disk capacity
Random IO is converted
into HDD-friendly sequential
IO, allowing HDDs to deliver
SDD-like random write
performance
Flash as a read cache
accelerates reads
at significantly lower cost:
Compression
No RAID penalties
MLC flash
40
42. Nimble Scale-to-fit
Scale at the lowest incremental cost
CS2xx
~20K IOPS, 8 TB
4-Node CS700
Cluster
Up to 500K IOPS
PB Capacity
64TB of flash
CAPACITY
200TB
CS4xx
~60K IOPS
CS7xx, AFS
125K IOPS, 16TB flash
PERFORMANCE
41
43. D2D + Replication Snapshots + Replication
Primary
Backup
Disaster
Recovery
Transformation in Data Protection Model
Tier 3
(+Dedupe)
42
No backup window
Rapid local recovery
Cost-effective,
simple DR
No Tapes
44. D2D + Replication Snapshots + Replication
Primary
Backup
Disaster
Recovery
Complementing Data Protection: Provisioning and Managing Copies
Space-efficient
clones
43
No backup window
Rapid local recovery
Cost-effective,
simple DR
Instantaneous zero-copy
clones (e.g., for test and
dev instances)
Tier 3
(+Dedupe)
45. Superior to Tiered Hybrids
44
Disk / usable capacity
IOPS
Latency
480 drives / 1 PB
~2-4 ms
Additional software and hardware
228 drives / 1 PB
< 1 ms
Built-in Snapshots and replication
Nimble CS700VNX7600
Data Protection
Management
100K IOPS
Additional software
500K IOPS
InfoSight
Petabyte scale
deployment
46. Better Scaling, Protection, and Management Than All-Flash Arrays
Scalability
Resiliency
Data Protection
Management
Scale out only
Dual parity RAID for SSDs
Additional software
Additional software
Scale-to-fit (Scale-out, scale-up, scale-
deep)
Impervious to flash failures; triple parity
on disk
Snapshots and replication
InfoSight
45
• All data on flash
• 500K IOPs
• Latency <1ms
Nimble CS700 ClusterXtremIO Cluster
